AUTOMATION

Automation may be a good thing, but don't forget
that it began with Frankenstein.—Anonymous

Automation has opened up for thousands of skilled
employees a whole new world of unemployment.—Anonymous

Why should we take it upon ourselves to pick up the
pieces after industry discards people for machines? Isn't it about time
unions got in there before the fact to insist that there must be some
obligation to people in all this?—Harry Bridges

As machines become more and more
efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the
greatness of man.—Ernst Fischer

Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who
must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to
the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay.—John
Kenneth Galbraith, American economist

Instead of proving to be "labor saving
devices," our machines create more work for more of us to do! Instead of
the "problem" of leisure, we face an array of problems caused by
overwork; families that erode because we have less time to be at home, troubled
and troubling young people who share little or no time with adults, anemic
communities bled dry of the people's time, their life's blood, and institutions
that focus solely on teaching people how to work rather than how to live
together freely.—Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt

Man is still the most extraordinary computer of
all.—John F. Kennedy

You can not endow even the best machine with
initiative.--Walter Lippmann

Instantly, the noise stopped. The whole room lay in
perfect silence. The tire builders stood in long lines, touching each other, perfectly
motionless, deafened by the silence.... For the first time in history,
American mass-production workers had stopped a conveyor belt and halted the
inexorable movement of factory machinery.--Ruth
McKenney, ("Industrial Valley")

There's a time when the operation of the machine
becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you
can't even tacitly take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears
and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop. And
you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that
unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.—Mario
Savio

Technology will save us if it doesn't wipe us out first.—Pete Seeger, folksinger, songwriter, activist, pacifist, and humanist

Too often man becomes clever instead of becoming
wise, he becomes inventive but not thoughtful--and sometimes...he can create
himself right out of existence.—Rod Serling, The Twilight
Zone (closing of "The Brain Center at Whipple's")

Those machines had kept going as long as we could
remember. When we finally pulled the switch and there was some quiet, I finally
remembered something... that I was a human being, that I could stop those
machines, that I was better than those machines anytime.—Striking
machine worker